Holly

July 23, 2021

Jerome calls Holly at quarter past six from outside the Steinman house and tells her of his adventures. He says he had to take Vera to the hospital himself, because all of the Kiner ambulances, plus those from the city’s Emergency Services Department, were on Covid calls. He carried her to his car, wedged her into the passenger bucket seat, buckled her up, and drove to the hospital as fast as he dared.

“I rolled down the window, thinking the fresh air might revive her a little. I don’t know if it worked, she was still pretty soupy when we got there, but it saved me the expense of getting the Mustang steam cleaned. She vomited twice on the way, but down the side. Which will wash off. That stink is a lot harder to get off the carpeting.”

He tells Holly that Vera also vomited twice while she was seizing. “I got her on her side before she spewed the second time. Which was good because it cleared her airway, but at first she wasn’t breathing. That scared the crap out of me. I gave her mouth-to-mouth. She might have started again on her own, but I was afraid she might not.”

“You probably saved her life.”

Jerome laughs. To Holly it sounds shaky. “I don’t know about that, but I’ve rinsed my mouth out half a dozen times since and I can still taste gin-flavored puke. When I got to her house she said I could take off my mask, she’d had Covid and was chock-full of antibodies. I hope she was right. I don’t know if even a double dose of Pfizer would stand up to that kind of soul kiss.”

“Why are you still there? Didn’t they keep her overnight?”

“Are you kidding? There’s not a single available bed in that place. There was a car-crash guy lying in the hall, moaning and covered with blood.”

My mother died in a hospital just like that, Holly thinks. She was rich.

“Did they do anything for her?”

“Pumped her stomach, and when she could say her name they sent her home with me. No paperwork or anything, just your basic wham-bam-thank-you-ma’am. Crazy. It’s like all the systems are breaking down, you know?”

Holly says she does.

“I got her inside—she could walk—and to her bedroom. She said she could undress herself and I took her word for it but when I looked in, she was lying there fully dressed and snoring. Puke all down the side of my car, but she never got a speck on her clothes, which were nice. I think she dressed for me.”

“You’re probably right. You wanted to talk to her about her son, after all.”

“The nurse said there were also a few half-digested pills in the stuff they pumped out of her. I’m not sure she was trying to kill herself, but she might have been.”

“You saved her life,” Holly says. No probably this time.

“This time, maybe. What about next time?”

Holly has no good answer for that.

“If you could have seen her, Holly… I mean before she went down… perfectly put together, totally coherent. But knocking back gin like they were going to outlaw it next week. I could have left thinking that she was perfectly okay, except for a hangover tomorrow. How is that possible?”

“She’s built up a tolerance. Hers must be higher than most. You say Peter’s skateboard was in his room?”

“Yeah. There was a search party combing the park, looking for him… or his body… and one of them found it in the bushes. I didn’t get a chance to ask her, but I’d bet you anything they found it in the Thickets. Which is not far from where the Dahl woman’s bike was found. I think Dahl and Steinman might be related, Holly. I really do.”

Holly was about to make herself a Stouffer’s chipped beef on toast for supper—her go-to comfort food—when Jerome called. Now she drops the frozen packet into a pot of boiling water. According to the box you can microwave it, which is quicker, but Holly never does it that way. Her mother always said that microwaves were first-class food ruiners, and like so many of her mother’s teachings, it has stuck with her only child. Oranges are gold in the morning and lead at night. Sleeping on your left side wears out your heart. Only sluts wear half-slips.

“Holly? Did you hear me? I said I think Dahl and the Steinman boy might—”

“I heard you. I need to think about it. Did he have a helmet for skateboarding? I should have asked those boys, but I never thought of it.”

“You didn’t think of it because they weren’t wearing them,” Jerome says. “Neither was Peter Steinman, if he was going out to meet his friends that night. They would have called him a pussy.”

“Really?”

“Absolute. He didn’t take his phone and he didn’t wear his helmet. It was in his room next to his board. I don’t think he ever wore it. Looked like it just came out of the box. Not a scratch on it.”

Holly stares at the bag of chipped beef, turning over and over in the boiling water. “What about the uncle in Florida?” She answers her own question. “Mrs. Steinman would have called him, of course.”

“She did and the detective in charge—Porter—also did. She tried, Holly. With herself and with her boy. Quit drinking for a year. Got another job. It’s a fucking tragedy. Do you think I should stay over with her? Steinman? The living room smells pretty bad and the couch doesn’t look what you’d call comfy, but I will if you think I should.”

“No. Go home. But before you do I think you should go back in, check her breathing, and check the medicine cabinet. If she’s got tranquilizers or pain pills or stuff for depression, like Zoloft or Prozac, dump them down the toilet. The booze too, if you want. But that’s only a stopgap. She can always get new prescriptions and they sell booze everywhere. You know that, right?”

Jerome sighs. “Yeah. I do. Hols, if you could have seen her before she went down… I thought she was okay. Sad for sure, and drinking too much, but I really thought…” He trails off.

“You did what you could. She’s lost her only child, and unless there’s a miracle, she’s lost him for good. She’ll either cope—go back to her meetings, sober up, get on with her life—or she won’t. That Chinese proverb about how you’re responsible for someone if you save their life is so much poop. I know that’s hard, but it’s the truth.” She stares at the boiling water. “At least, as I understand it.”

“One thing might help her,” Jerome says.

“What’s that?”

“Closure.”

Closure is a myth, she thinks… but doesn’t say. Jerome is young. Let him have his illusions.

Holly eats her chipped beef on toast at her tiny kitchen table. She thinks it’s the perfect meal because there’s hardly anything to clean up. She feels bad for Jerome, and terrible for Peter Steinman’s mother. Jerome was right when he called it a tragedy, but Holly is wary of lumping the missing woman and the missing boy together. She knows perfectly well what Jerome is thinking about: a serial, like Ted Bundy or John Wayne Gacy or the Zodiac. But most serials are fundamentally uncreative, not capable of getting past some unresolved psychological trauma. They go on picking versions of the same victim until they’re caught. The so-called Son of Sam killed a number of women with dark wavy hair, possibly because he couldn’t kill Betty Broder, the woman who birthed him and then abandoned him.

Or maybe Berkowitz just liked seeing their heads explode, the Bill Hodges in her head remarks.

“Oough,” Holly says.

But Bonnie Rae and Peter Steinman are too different to be the work of one person. She’s sure of it. Or almost sure; she’s willing to admit the similar locations and the abandoned modes of transportation, bike and skateboard.

That reminds her to check with Penny about Bonnie’s clothes. Are any of them missing? Did she possibly have a suitcase of duds stashed somewhere, maybe with her friend Lakeisha? Holly takes out her notebook and scratches a reminder to ask that. She’ll call tonight, try to set up an appointment with Lakeisha for the following afternoon, but she’ll save her important questions for when they are face to face.

She rinses her plate and puts it in her dishwasher, the smallest Magic Chef the company makes, perfect for the single lady with no man in her life. She returns to the table and lights a cigarette. Nothing, in Holly’s opinion, finishes a meal as perfectly as a smoke. They also aid the deductive process.

Not that I have anything to deduce, she thinks. Maybe after I dig a little deeper, but all I can do now is speculate.

“Which is dangerous,” she tells her empty kitchen.

Silver bells tinkle, which means it’s her personal (the office ring is the standard Apple xylophone). She expects it to be Jerome, with something he forgot to tell her, but it’s Pete Huntley.

“You were right about Izzy. She was delighted to give me what she found out about the Dahl girl’s credit and phone. On the Visa, no activity. On the Verizon account, ditto. Iz went back in to see if there were any charges in the last ten days. There haven’t been. Her last credit card purchase were jeans from Amazon on June 27th. Isabelle says when you call Dahl’s phone, you can no longer leave a voicemail, just get the robot telling you the mailbox is full. And there’s no way to track it.”

“So Bonnie or someone else took out the SIM card.”

“It sure wasn’t a case of nonpayment. The phone bill was paid on July 6th, five days after the girl disappeared. All her bills were paid on the 6th. Ordinarily the bank pays on the first Monday of the month, but that Monday was the official holiday, so…”

“Was it NorBank?”

“Yeah. How did you know?”

“It’s where her mother works. Or did until some of the branches shut down. She says when they re-open, she expects to be rehired. How much is in Bonnie Dahl’s account?”

“I don’t know because Isabelle doesn’t. It would take a court order to get that info, and Iz doesn’t see the point in trying for one. Neither do I. It’s not what’s important. You know what is, right?”

Holly knows, all right. Financially speaking, Bonnie Rae Dahl is dead in the water. Which is probably a terrible metaphor under the circumstances. “Pete, you sound better. Not coughing so much.”

“I feel better, but this Covid is a real ass-kicker. I think if I hadn’t gotten those shots, I’d be in the hospital. Or…” He quits there, no doubt thinking of his partner’s mother, who didn’t get the shots.

“Go to bed early. Drink fluids.”

“Thank you, nurse.”

Holly ends the call and lights another cigarette. She goes to the window and looks out. It’s still hours until dark, but the sunlight has taken on the evening slant that always feels rueful to her, and a little sad. Another day older, another day closer to the grave, her mother used to say. Her mother who is now in her grave.

“She stole from me,” Holly murmurs. “She stole the trust fund I got from Janey. Not all of it, but most of it. My own mother.”

She tells herself that’s the past. Bonnie Rae Dahl may still be alive.

But.

No action on her Visa. No calls made from her phone. Holly supposes a trained secret agent—one of John le Carré’s “joes”—could slip away like that, shedding the ties to modern life the way a snake sheds its skin, but a twenty-four-year-old college librarian? No. Not unlikely, just no.

Bonnie Rae Dahl is dead. Holly knows it.

Holly has an ill-formed (and totally unscientific) idea that exercise can offset some of the damage she’s doing to her body by renewing her smoking habit, so after speaking with Pete she takes a two-mile walk in the latening light, ending up at the south end of Deerfield Park. The playground is full of kids swinging and teeter-tottering, sliding and hanging upside-down from the jungle gym. She watches them in an unguarded way no man could get away with in this century of sexual hyper-awareness, not consciously thinking about her new case, subconsciously thinking of nothing else. She has a nagging sensation that she’s forgetting something, but refuses to chase it. Whatever it is will make itself known eventually.

She calls Lakeisha Stone when she gets home. The woman who answers sounds exuberant and high on life (other substances possible). In the background Holly can hear music—it might be Otis Redding—and people laughing. There are occasional whoops. Other substances probable, Holly thinks.

“Hi, whoever you are,” Lakeisha says. “If this is some car warranty offer or how I can improve my credit rating—”

“It’s not.” Holly introduces herself, explains why she’s calling, and asks if she could meet with Lakeisha tomorrow afternoon, lateish. She says she has to be close to Upsala Village on family business. Would that be convenient?

It’s a much less exuberant Lakeisha who says that she’d be happy to talk to Holly. She’s with friends at the campground on Route 27, the one with the Indian name—does Holly know it? Holly says she doesn’t, and doesn’t say that these days Indian is considered a pejorative at best, racist at worst. She says she’s sure the GPS on her phone will take her right there.

“Nothing about Bonnie? No word?”

“No word at all,” Holly says.

“Then I don’t know how I can help you, Ms. Gibney.”

“You can help me with one thing right now. Do you think she ran away?”

“God, no.” Her voice wavers. When she speaks again, all traces of exuberance are gone. “I think she’s dead. I think some sick bastard raped her and killed her.”

That night Holly prays on her knees, being sure to name-check her friends and saying that she’s sorry she resumed her smoking habit and hopes that God will help her quit again soon (but not just yet). She tells God she doesn’t want to think about her mother tonight—what Charlotte did and why she did it. She ends by asking for any help God can give her in the case of the missing woman and concludes by saying she hopes that Bonnie Rae is still alive.

She gets into bed and looks up into the darkness, wondering what was nagging her at the park. As sleep approaches, ready to take her in, it comes to her: have there been other disappearances in the vicinity of Deerfield Park?

She thinks it might be interesting to find out.